BPoFD Podcast Episode #20: Prequels Were Better with Seaners

In Episode #20 of the BPoFD Podcast, managing editor Carmen Petaccio again sits down with visual artist and film critic Sean “Seaners” Lopez to discuss Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Highlights include incoherent rants about Rey’s ability to sabe, Stormtrooper birthing centers, and, of course, Supreme Leader Snoke. If you’re interested in being featured on a future podcast, please see the BPoFD Podcast Page for details and contact information. Special thanks again to Seaners for his time, fellowship, and conversation.

[…] As there is matter and anti-matter, can there be film and anti-film? If the satisfaction of certain aesthetic and formal criteria can be said to make a film “recognizable,” what would an absolute failure to satisfy those criteria look like to audiences? Good, bad, and mediocre art all have their distinguishing characteristics, but what about the absence of art? As it pertains to film, what if this absence wasn’t a blank screen, but a full one, overrun with the unseeable, the unspeakable, the absence of everything a film should be? Perversion pervades. Where there was once genuine feeling, there is manufactured nostalgia. Where there was narrative coherence, there is diegetic chaos. Canned humor plays like tragedy, serious scenes comes across as laughable. Characters shed substance until they’re simply names, more arbitrary nonsense shouted amongst the static, the noise. When does film become anti-film? Probably near the end of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, when an aged Luke Skywalker, in slow motion and extreme close-up, limbos below the energy blade of a lightsaber. May the Force choke all involved. Prequels were better. […]